The Big Read: The magic of the moment

We all have our own rituals to help us into a new year. For some people their ritual is to bounce from venue to venue, confident that a better party is being held somewhere but growing increasingly convinced that they haven't been invited to it.

For others it's to find the place occupied by the most other people, and to wedge themselves into that large group of people, presumably on the theory that this must be the place to be because so many other people can't be wrong.

I once had a girlfriend whose father's invariable New Year's Eve ritual was to end 364 days of sobriety by opening a bottle of whisky. He had one drink a year and it was a long one, and it always ended with him sitting in his armchair with a paper hat on his head, crying like a beauty queen and trying to remember the plot of his favourite movie, Thoroughly Modern Millie, featuring Julie Andrews.

I have a ritual too. "Never go with a hippy to a second venue," said Jack Donaghy - well, my motto is never go with anyone to a first venue on New Year's Eve. Instead I stay home and vacuum the carpet in my study. You may now be tutting and sighing at the aching and ineffable sadness of this spectacle, but I find it cheering and reassuring and it leaves my carpet clean and it eliminates the dust and detritus and sloughed DNA of the previous year and it doesn't take long and after that I'm free to make my wife a Pisco Sour and then do whatever we want.

Some years we make a jigsaw puzzle but this year we didn't even do that.

Just before midnight we open the back door then the front door and sit on the porch step and listen to the schmucks down the road celebrating 30 seconds too early, then we allow the new year to arrive and the old year to leave and we close the doors and take a walk around our neighbourhood and alongside the dark sea that doesn't know the year has turned, and then we go home to sleep.

New Year's Eve is the one night of all nights that I do not take a drink.

Human beings are superstitious things, or I am anyway, and we cling to our rituals as though they're magic spells to ward off evil and bad luck. Since I started doing this, some seven or eight years now, no evil or bad luck has befallen me. But still, you can't be too strict about rituals. You can't let them calcify around you and make you brittle and suspicious of the world. Rituals should be things of celebration, not precaution; they should rise from joy, not from fear.

Ordinarily I would be strictly and safely at home from the mid-afternoon, but this year we spent the afternoon with good friends and ate an unscheduled dinner with them and it felt good and right and full of love.

The next day we spontaneously went to other dear friends for lunch and as we all sat around the table in the slanting sunshine, friends and acquaintances, a group of people who for one reason and another hadn't seen in the new year together, someone complained that she hadn't had a proper countdown to midnight, the night before.

A proper countdown is her ritual, and without it the previous year felt incomplete and the new year not yet born. We felt bad about that, in the distant way that people feel bad when it's not their ritual that has been broken, but what could be done about it? By now it was 4.18pm on New Year's Day.

Then someone suggested a countdown to 4.19 pm, and everyone gamely enough agreed. It started off politely and sedately but then it reached zero and everyone shouted "Happy New Year" and as we turned and kissed the people on either side of us, something unexpected and extraordinary happened.

It suddenly felt as rich and intense and emotional as a New Year, but the best kind of New Year, a new year breaking because we had spontaneously decided it had, something starting because we wanted it to start, a moment being celebrated because moments are worth celebrating, and we all started laughing and everyone stood and hugged everyone else and we felt happy and we wanted each other to be happy and I beamed and laughed and quietly wept the first weird tear of 2017.

I hope we all have a good year. Wherever we all are on New Year's Eve or at 4.19pm on January 1 2018, I hope we're all happy and making new rituals, even if they only last for just that moment.